The first episode in the Unfathomless series comes from a man who can do such assemblages in his sleep (and probably has !) : Mathieu Ruhlmann has been audio-documenting anything that moves (or lies) for years, and the Vancouver-based sonographer doesn’t have far to go for Tsukubai‘s recording – the Nitobe Memorial Garden at the university of British Columbia. Most of the album is based on hydrophone recordings, evident throughout as little is done to mask nature’s tones. The tracks unfold steadily, soft focus drones slowly seeping through as the 8 seamlessly blended tracks evolve, each a variation on a theme, compare and contrast, for example “Tsukubai IV” & “Tsukubai VI”…
Alan Lockett
Furthernoise
~
…The Unfathomless releases are beautifully presented in very nice sleeves that remind me a lot of the heyday of Trente Oiseaux’s lovely sleeve designs. The eight pieces here then are all created using field recordings and a lot of hydrophone recordings made at a Japanese garden in Vancouver. The different recordings are then layered, edited, stopped, started and generally merged together into one long stream of watery,echoey, whispery sounds…It is very well recorded, put together and presented…
The hydrophone recordings are generally underlaid with distant soft drones recorded from the air, the odd passing aircraft, perhaps distant traffic or softly blowing wind, sometimes treated heavily, sometimes allowed to play through naked…
there is a series of roaring, sizzling sounds in the eighth piece I rather like that do set that one track apart…It all drifts along very nicely…I am certain that fans of this area of music (and suddenly there does seem to be an awful lot of them) will enjoy this release…[edited version]
Richard Pinnell
The Watchful Ear
~
…What struck me also as odd is the fact that this release would have been also very suitable for a release on Mystery Sea. The recordings made by Ruhlmann here were made with a hydrophone (an underwater microphone) at some gardens in Canada (sorry, the exact location is hard to read), and whilst cut into eight smaller pieces, I think we must see the entire thing as one long track. It dwells heavily on field recordings, well, perhaps only on field recordings, as a matter of fact, of events happening in a pond, although I’m clueless what those events would be. However, the resulting piece of music stretches beyond the notion of a pure piece of field recordings, even when there is perhaps little sense of post processing, save perhaps for some equalization. At the start there is water sounds, ducks maybe but as the piece evolves we sink deeper under the water surface and things get more and more abstract. Quite a solid work of field recordings that actually get beyond the idea of ‘just’ field recordings and is a beautifully composed piece of music.[edited version]
Frans de Waard
Vital Weekly
